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2/6/15 – Ain’t No Place For No Hero

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:

IMG_1433

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):

25/5/15 – No Average Days in Oxford

Oop, slightly late post this time. Last night I went to Port & Policy and then watched Poltergeist in 3D… and was surprisingly not scared at all? So that was cool. It’s the second horror movie I’ve watched in as many nights! Who knew I would come out of Oxford such a changed person? 😛

But actually, the reason I didn’t write anything last night was because I really wasn’t sure what I wanted to write about. This morning I realized that my friend from home, Callan (just finished studying in Philly! http://blogs.whitman.edu/callancarow), had a great idea: A Day in the Life. So, I started writing one out, and then I realized that each day is so different it’s hard to describe an average day! I wake up anywhere between 7:30am and 11:30am (depending on whether or not I have a tutorial, and how much work I have gotten done), I go to bed any time between midnight and 3 or 4am, and in between– well, I eat my meals different places, with different groups of people, I switch up where I study, and I almost always have some unexpected event. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve had a single day here where everything has gone according to plan. But here’s a taste of what an average, non-tutorial day might look like!

10-10:30: wake up, check phone (ug I never used to do this, it’s only recently become a habit… ah well)

10:30-11:15: go for a run in the gorgeous University Parks, listening to my running playlist, which includes “Radioactive” by Imagine Dragons, “Shake It Off” by Florence and the Machine, “Get Luck” by Daft Punk, and a bunch of other good pump-up songs (recently realized that what I thought was a 1-mile lap around the parks is actually 2 miles, so I’ve been running about twice as far as I thought I was!)

11:15-12:00: cool down, do core strengthening exercises, stretch, shower, eat some yogurt/a banana/small bowl of cereal

12:00-12:45: make a plan for the day, if I haven’t already; respond to emails, take care of any chores that need to get done

12:45-13:15: eat lunch in Hall with other visiting students and sometimes a few British students

13:15-16:15: study in the comfy chairs in Café Nero at Blackwell’s (my favorite study spot ever); order a Hot Chocolate Milano (mmmmm), read ~60 pages of Ulysses, brainstorm and research for Creative Writing

16:15-17:00: go for a walk with one of my friends, discuss our plans for the future, analyze personality differences, share stories of our past, take in the beauty of Oxford

17:00-19:00: another study session; look up articles and books for next paper, read through and take notes, outline my paper and collect important quotes and bibliographical information

19:00-20:00: eat formal dinner in Hall

20:00-22:00: more studying; catch up on whatever I haven’t finished, try to get ahead on my reading; goal by the end of the day: write 500-1000 words combined for the papers/writing pieces for each of my tutorials

22:00-23:00: meet up in the JCR (Junior Common Room) for drinks and a break

23:00-24:00: watch Game of Thrones with the group of people who follow the show

24:00-1:00: head back to my room, check in with my roommate and decompress/talk about our days, work through thoughts that have been bothering us

1:00-1:30: get ready for bed; listen to some music, do some reading, maybe write out some thoughts on the day

1:30-2:00: set alarm for the next day, draw the curtain between my section of the room and my roommate’s, fall asleep in my cozy bed 🙂

It sounds so chill when I write it out like that! It feels like there is much more happening– and I think often there is (and I do have to spend quite a few hours each day working, and always several days a week in libraries rather than cafés so that I can check out books for research). I just love the flexibility of it all– as long as I make sure I have time for work, the rest of the day is up to me! And there are so many amazing things to do. In the next few weeks, I’m looking forward to more circus and figure drawing, a trip to Manchester to go to a barbecue festival and see The Heavy (alt rock band), an outing to London to watch As You Like It at The Globe theatre, hearing a cello concerto and the 1812 Overture in concert, annnnd about 800 pages more of Ulysses and several dozen pages of writing. It’s gonna be great.

17/5/15- Falling Faintly, Faintly Falling

Wow. So… #1 thing that is rough about studying abroad at Oxford: when literally everyone else on the planet (by which I mean students at most U.S. colleges) finish up in May, and in Oxford you still have… a good month left of heavy reading and essay writing. XP Once this week is up, I will be starting on Ulysses, and my work load will be increasing significantly, so… that is going to be fun.

What’s really making it hard to focus, though, is that I feel like my social group here has had all of the drama that would happen over an entire four years at school at home, shoved into 2 short terms. Particularly in the last couple days, a lot has happened, and I am struggling to know how best to support my friends, to take care of myself, to continue to build my relationships with everyone, to balance it all…

And I’m realizing how little I understand loss.

One of my friends here is going through an incredible loss at the moment, and I’m watching everyone try to support her, telling her there is a reason for everything and it will make sense at some point, that she’ll bounce back like she always does… and I don’t know. I can’t tell her that there’s a reason for everything; I don’t know that. I am… left without words. Trying to communicate in gestures: a hug, a gift, a gaze.

It’s odd, I think, to relate a situation so personal to what I’m studying in my tutorial, but it’s also something I can’t quite avoid doing. I’ve been speaking a lot with my tutor about how Joyce, especially in Dubliners, communicates almost entirely through underlying feelings, created by patterns of repetition and webs of association; the words alone aren’t enough to say what he is trying to say. I struggled with Joyce quite a bit when I first read him in high school; this time around seems vastly different. He is a master of using words to communicate something that cannot be communicated in words. I am trying to bring that into my own writing as I work on short stories this term, but it’s so hard. I’m trying to bring that into my interactions with others, and that is an equal if not greater challenge.

I read “The Dead” this week– or rather, reread it, as I’d read it once before in high school, and thought it overrated– and the ending nearly brought me to tears. I couldn’t say exactly what it was; the distance between each of the characters, maybe, the way that they continually missed each other, missed the signs each was trying to send, found themselves feeling the right thing at the wrong time. And that last line: “His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.” Damn. Just the sound– read it aloud and the sound of it (saying nothing for the literal meaning of the words), the repetition of those “s” and “f” sounds creating a background of “fffssss,” like snow falling, holds its feeling.

For my essay, I’m tying “The Dead” back to the work I did with Heidegger and phenomenology last term: the idea of “death” or “demise” as not a literal death, but rather

“the experience of existential world collapse that occurs when we confront the ineliminable anxiety that… emerges from the uncanny fact that there is nothing about the structure of the self that can tell us what specifically to do with our lives” (Iain Thompson, “Death and Demise in Being and Time”).

That is a lot of words, but basically it’s the idea that being is inherently tied to non-being; we live in a world of possibilities, and the fulfillment of one possibility (by choice or otherwise) is necessarily the nullification of the others (multiverse theory might beg to differ, but I’m not going to go there). To recognize this, and to recognize that there may be no reason for one possibility over the others, is for Heidegger a sort of “death.” Yet it is this “death” which he believes allows one to live authentically, to be in touch with oneself and one’s place among the world, among others.

I really don’t have a great way to end this post. Funnily enough, we’ve laughed a lot today– more than I’ve laughed in a long time. I think maybe laughter is one of the parts of loss that I didn’t really understand. At least not in words.

So I’m going to end, as I often do, with a song. This one starts with laughter, and (like “The Dead”) isn’t quite the kind of “Death” you think it will be:

“What’s the difference between my love or scheme? The difference in what you say or mean? What do you mean you don’t really know?”

Full lyrics: http://genius.com/Made-in-heights-death-lyrics